Читать книгу Let ’Em Howl - Patricia Sorbara - Страница 6

I have been a person of politics for more than forty years. It’s been my passion. I’ve put in hundreds of hours as a volunteer and I’ve worked as a staff person at many levels, both provincially and federally—moving up the ranks from constituency assistant to the campaign director and chief executive officer of the Ontario Liberal Party. Even when I stepped away from it completely, to pursue a different career path, it pulled me back. Over and over. It has always been there—in my head, in my heart, in my subconscious. And while I think it’s partly because I’m very good at it, I know it’s mostly because I believed, from a very early age, that government matters—and by extension, politics matters, too. Ultimately it meant that I was destined to be a political lifer.

I was always aware of the phrase “women in politics” and to be honest, it was odd to me. In the earliest years I was obviously cognizant of how few women were elected officials but in the part of the political world in which I was operating, the majority of the people who did the work—in the background and in campaigns—were women. When I started my career in the late 1970s and early 1980s, women in general were still being discouraged from putting their careers ahead of all else. But in politics, women were beginning to wield significant influence behind the scenes. All you had to do was ask the male politicians whom they counted on the most. There was almost always a woman running the show in the backroom, and the smartest politicians didn’t make a move without her okay.

Beyond that, the campaign offices were filled with women who did the manual work and ran the day-to-day. They executed key decisions, managed volunteers, trained canvassers and led the outreach to voters. But they also made meals and swept floors. They taught me how to recognize priorities and manage crises while, at the same time, it was made clear to me that no job was too small. They taught me it was always about getting the job done, whatever that required and however long that took. I learned an incredible amount at the feet of those women, and I loved every minute of it.

But after a while it became apparent to me that, while female role models were never lacking in the backroom, what was lacking was the number of women who sat at the table—and who had a voice—where the decisions were being made. The table didn’t matter—whether they were tables in campaign offices, the caucus room or the cabinet table, there weren’t enough of us. And I wanted to help change that.

Much has been written in recent years about cracking the glass ceiling, which in politics almost always refers to elected women. It has been thrilling to watch the change around women running for office. I started recruiting female candidates in the days when the comments would run along the lines of, “The voters of this riding will never elect a woman,” or “There are no qualified women in this riding.” That’s why it was so meaningful to me to have had a significant role in electing the first woman leader of a mainstream political party in Ontario and years later, to hold the second-most senior role on the team that won the fight to elect the first woman premier of Ontario.

Little did I know that just months after electing that woman, I’d find myself in a position I never imagined I’d face. In December 2014, my cover as a backroom operative far from the public eye was blown completely when it was announced I was being investigated in relation to ostensibly bribing a potential candidate to step down in a nomination race in Sudbury, Ontario. Suddenly I was catapulted to the front pages of the newspapers and lead-off questions in question period.

The first day of my trial—September 7, 2017—held in a heritage courthouse in Sudbury, was my sixty-first birthday. As I walked into the courtroom for the first time, one of my lawyers, Erin Dann, turned to me and said, “There’s something I should have mentioned sooner.”

I’d be required to enter a plea. Erin quickly explained that both counts against me would be read out by the clerk, and I would need to respond, “Not guilty.” I was to sound confident and calm, and to look directly at the judge when I said those two words.

I was, in fact, confident. But while I felt calm as I entered the courtroom, I had not prepared myself for that moment (I was prepared for a hundred other moments, but not that one!). As I heard the first count being read, a surge of emotion surfaced, but I had to push through and focus on the task at hand. Other than when Premier Kathleen Wynne took the stand, and when the judge delivered his final verdict forty-seven days from the start of the trial, this was the most intense moment of the experience for me. My breathing became a bit erratic and tears threatened. It became much bigger than having to answer what seemed like a simple question: “How do you plead?”

It was in that moment that I alone had to answer. Reality crashed down, and I had no choice but to discard my disbelief at actually standing before a judge.

I spared a thought for my long-time therapist, the late Dr. Ralph Bierman, who taught me how to manage my anxiety. I reached deep and slowed my breathing. It felt a little like what people describe as your life flashing before your eyes in the moment of a sudden death. In this case, it was my political life flashing before my eyes. I had survived every major challenge I’d encountered, because I had learned to believe in myself, and to trust my gut and what I knew to be true.

I thought of all the people who believed in me. In the room was my good friend Kathy Robinson and my strong legal team. Family and friends who were angry and frustrated on my behalf had gone out of their way to be sure I knew how much faith they had in me, and in my integrity. And there was my Liberal family, most of whom had supported me from the first moment the so-called “Sudbury scandal” took root.

It did not take long to reach the place I needed to go. I had been there before. I refused to allow the doubt of others, the nastiness, the mean-spirited intent to do damage, to overtake what I knew in my gut. I was innocent, and I would be proven innocent.

In a clear, confident voice—but with my heart pounding in my chest—I responded “Not guilty” to both counts. Erin later said the tone was perfect, genuine. People often seem shocked when someone sounds genuine. The simple reality is that it’s easy to be that authentic when you believe what you are saying, when you’re telling the truth. The trick is to figure out where that conviction lives. Mine came from a place inside of me that existed only because of years and years of fighting the battles as they came along—and learning the lessons that came with those battles—and never giving into those who wanted me or my cause to fail. It’s the place that my hero Nellie McClung was referring to when she said, “Never retract, never explain, never apologize—get the thing done and let them howl!” I was a warrior and I would win this battle no matter who was howling, and regardless of the fact that this was the most public fight of my career.

The Sudbury saga was major for me of course, but truth be told, had I returned to work as if it had not happened, it probably would have faded into another chapter in my compendium of career lessons. What happened after the charges were dismissed, though—when I tried to return to my place in the Ontario Liberal Party—was a whole different story. That experience motivated me to document what it’s like for a person who has dedicated much of their life to partisan politics. After all, what else was I going to do when I found myself sitting on the sidelines as my party self-destructed in the 2018 campaign in Ontario, when Kathleen Wynne joined the ranks of strong women who failed to be re-elected?

My intention in writing this book is not to name names (though that will happen in the course of my storytelling) but to draw from my experience to share the best lessons I learned in the backroom—the ones that sustained me in both the brightest and darkest hours of my career. It’s my hope that this book will become required reading of sorts for anyone considering a career in politics or as political staff in government, so they come to understand the highs and lows that await them.

But the lessons aren’t just for the politically inclined. What I’ve learned crosses industries and positions and is especially relevant for any woman who envisions herself at the helm of something big—even if she intends to direct the show from behind the curtain. In fact, maybe this book should actually be called How to Let ’Em Howl. Because if I can teach the next generation of political staffers, especially women, anything, it should be that.